Plastic Podcast Episode 1: A Brief History of Plastic
Episode Descritption:
In the debut episode of the Plastic Podcast, host Clark Marchese takes listeners on a journey through the fascinating history of plastic. From its humble beginnings as a replacement for ivory billiard balls to its modern-day ubiquity, plastic has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past century.
With special guest Dr. Seth Rasmussen, a polymers and plastics chemist with a passion for science history, the episode delves into the origins of plastic and its evolution into the versatile material we know today. Rasmussen sheds light on key milestones in plastic development, and how societal attitudes towards plastic have shifted over time, from viewing it as a durable alternative to natural materials to its current status as a symbol of disposable convenience.
Credits:
Episode Guest: Dr. Seth Rasmussen.
Browse his publications on ResearchGate
More information about the episode and the Plastic Podcast
Episode Transcript on at Pine Forest Media Website
Follow Pine Forest Media on Instagram @pineforestmedia
Hosted by Clark Marchese
Produced, written, and edited by Clark Marchese
Cover art and Logo by Laurel Wong.
Theme music by Tadeo Cabellos
Transcript:
[00:00:29.710] - Clark Marchese
Hello and welcome to the very first episode of the plastic podcast. My name is Clark Marchese and I am a science journalist and a podcaster. I like to cover all sorts of scientific topics, from animals to oceans to Antarctica, with the science and approach, meaning we take a look at the science and we see how it connects to other of things that are important to us as humans, our history, our economy, arts and culture, just to name a few. And this particular series that you have stumbled across is all about plastic. If you look up right now, I bet you can count at least 15 things made of plastic. It's all around us, and it's only like 100 years old or so, a little bit longer. But I'm just wondering, how did this happen? And that's what this series is dedicated to understanding. When I had the idea for this show, I thought it would be a quick miniseries about the science of plastic microplastics in the oceans, realities of recycling plastic bags at the grocery store. Done. The more I got into the subject, though, the more I see how much there is to talk about when it comes to plastic.
[00:01:35.250] - Clark Marchese
Our relationship with this material is very complex, for better or for worse. On one hand, plastic is a leading contributor to climate change, so that is the worst. On the other hand, it saved millions of lives during the pandemic. We see plastic in the bottom of the Marianis trench and on the top of Mount Everest, but many of its consequences to our planet and our bodies are still unknown. Most interestingly for me is that there are so many scientists working on this issue, and I want to talk to as many of them as I can. I want to use science as a starting point to create a full narrative of plastic in the world. So over the course of several episodes, we will learn why plastic was first invented, how it came to be such an everyday part of our lives, the consequences that come with that, and what we should do about it now. So I hope you join me. The best way to do that is to subscribe. That's probably the first of many times you'll hear me say that, but it is the best way to know when a new episode comes out, and I do have a lot of interesting ones for you.
[00:02:32.910] - Clark Marchese
Before we begin, I do want to say that they're not all bad. There is a lot of bad, as you can imagine, and we will not ignore it. But I know that there can be some fatigue keeping up with every single new piece of bad news that comes out about the environment in 2024, or about anything for that matter. And we are going to get curious about it and just watch the world burn. No, I'm kidding. Although if that did make you think of Renee rap, then we should be friends. Anyways, in addition to the bad that's out there, there's not only some good, but there's also some things that are just cool. Did you know that there are some species that eat plastic? Like, not on accident, like the poor whales. Like, they actually eat it on purpose for food. And as far as good news is concerned, there's such a thing as a zero waste city. And urban areas on every continent are committed to becoming one. And also there's a team of over 300 scientists from around the world working on an antiplastics treaty that will be adopted by the United nations this year.
[00:03:31.070] - Clark Marchese
All of that to say is, I do have a lot of things to keep you interested, so I do hope you stick around. Now, that was my introduction to the show, and this is my introduction to the episode. And it just so happens that this is the very first one. So I thought a very good place to start would be at the beginning. This episode is all about the invention of plastic, and it all started because of elephants. That was fun and actually not random. And I have a guest here today who's going to explain to us, among other things, the elephant connection. His name is Dr. Seth Rasmussen, and he has a PhD in inorganic chemistry. He is a fellow of the oldest chemical society in the world, the Royal Society of Chemistry. And he is also a science historian and a professor at North Dakota State University. He told me all about how plastic got started and how breakthroughs in science allowed its place in our lives to grow over time. We also talked about the importance of merging science and history together, and that was very science and of us. Anyways, I hope you enjoy this very first episode of the plastic podcast.
[00:05:00.720] - Clark Marchese
All right, hello. Thank you so much for coming on the show. My first question would be if you could just please introduce yourself for us.
[00:05:07.860] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
Yes, I'm Professor Seth Rasmussen from the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota.
[00:05:16.780] - Clark Marchese
Amazing. So I know you have a wide range of research interests. Can you sort of characterize what your main focus is as a scientist?
[00:05:24.280] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
Yeah, it's kind of a loaded question. I have many, but most of my work really kind of focuses on two areas within traditional chemistry. I am a polymer and plastics chemist that develops semiconducting polymers and plastics for organic electronics. And then the other side of a lot of the work that I do is in the history of science. Particularly in the history of materials such as glass and plastics.
[00:05:48.540] - Clark Marchese
Okay, so that's actually why I wanted to talk to you today, is sort of to explore that intersection. We think of historians and scientists as two separate kinds of people with two separate fields of study entirely, but you exist in both spaces. So can you explain your interest in this historical perspective of science and why you think it's something that's important for scientists to be thinking about?
[00:06:09.180] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
Sure. So my interest in history developed while I was still in school. I just was interested in kind of where the field came from to some extent, because this is something that typically is not really covered in a lot of even graduate level courses. And so I picked up a book on the history of chemistry and read it and was captivated and then just started reading everything I could get my hands on. Later, when I started my career and started teaching, I started incorporating some of the history into my classes just to give the students a better perspective and to give them a little bit of a break from some of the more technical things that we were talking about. As a result of that, ultimately, I ended up developing a course just on the history of chemistry, and so covered the history from early cave paintings up through the 19 hundreds. While teaching that course, I found various what I would think of as holes in the narrative of the history, which no one really seemed to talk about. And just to do a better job teaching this subject, I started digging into some of these holes and trying to understand what actually happened as a result.
[00:07:06.110] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
I then wrote my first history paper, and everything has kind of snowballed from there to the point where now I do as much historical research as I do traditional chemistry research. In terms of why this is important for scientists, in my view, to really understand what we do and how we got here, we need to know the past. It changes our viewpoints on how science operates and how different things were developed. In addition, as a practicing chemist, it's quite common, not only in chemistry, but in many fields, for people to focus on the newest, most recent advances. And that's great in most cases, those are the best cases for anything that we're going to apply to something. However, sometimes I have found that older techniques that have kind of fallen away to where most people don't really know much about those anymore, can actually do a better job at solving some modern problems than our more recent advances. And so, again, having that older knowledge makes you a better scientist.
[00:08:11.840] - Clark Marchese
No, I think that is really important, and I think we can directly apply it to plastic. This is the first episode that's airing. But I actually just recorded one with a scientist who was telling me, well, obviously we know that there's a lot of problems with plastics and the way that we're using them now, and a lot of people are looking for alternatives. And she was telling me that we are going back to the historical records of the earliest iterations of plastic to find out how we can make them in a way that is better than the ones we ended up with. So that's just a really clear example of what you were just talking about as it applies to plastic. But beyond that example, or any example, really, I do think that there's a value in telling the full story for the sake of the full story. I could do a million episodes on the different ways that plastic is affecting our lives right now. But then we're missing a big part of it, which is, how did we get here? Because it did happen relatively quickly in terms of human history, but it didn't happen overnight.
[00:09:08.000] - Clark Marchese
So let's just get into it then. For anyone who doesn't know, most plastics today are made out of fossil fuels and also using fossil fuels, but what they're actually made of is largely crude oil. I was reading on the Internet that the very first plastics were made of a substance called cellulose nitrate. Maybe we can start with what is that?
[00:09:31.000] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
Okay, so cellulose nitrate is a derivative of cellulose. Cellulose is a naturally occurring material. It can be found in pretty much any plant. It makes up the kind of the cell walls of the plant. In fact, cotton is about 90% cellulose. And so as a consequence, they took this naturally occurring material, which was already being used for other things, just the basis of paper and cardboard, things like that.
[00:09:56.640] - Clark Marchese
Okay, so they were basically using plants then as a source material for the first plastics. And in that case, they could kind of use anything with a cell wall, if I understand correctly. So something that's green and grows out of the ground could work.
[00:10:09.860] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
And they found that if they treated it with nitric acid, or better yet, a mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid, they would convert this to cellulose nitrate. The only downside with it is, because of the chemical modification, it's extremely flammable. And so that did cause a lot of problems with early plastics based upon cellulose nitrate.
[00:10:39.870] - Clark Marchese
Okay, so this was happening in the middle of the 18 hundreds. And my question is, so these first people who were experimenting with cellulose and nitric acid, why were they doing that? I came across a story on the Internet that attributes the first invention of plastics to sort of a competition to create an alternative for billiard balls and also something to do with elephants. Is this in fact, the true story of the first plastics?
[00:11:05.270] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
Barkosine and celluloid are really the very first plastics. And so these are made from cellulose, nitrate. Barkosine was the earliest, and that was developed in the UK. I have less information about exactly what his motivation was, other than it was something he was trying to make to replace naturally occurring material. In the case of celluloid, the initial push was to find a material that could replace ivory for the production of billiard balls. And so prior to plastics, all billiard balls were made from ivory, which meant that these were shipped from Africa due to the slaughter of things like elephants and rhinotes. And so there had been kind of a competition put out that offered a reward if anyone could produce a material which could replace ivory for billiard balls. And so that kind of led then to the development of celluloid in the US.
[00:12:04.750] - Clark Marchese
Okay, so the elephant story has to do with celluloid, not parcocine, which came a little bit earlier. But I was so curious about this, I had to do a mini Internet deep dive. Here's what I found. In the 1860s, a billiard ball company in New York City made the competition. They put out an advert in the newspaper offering $10,000 worth of gold to anyone who could come up with an alternative to ivory. I assume this was in the currency of the 1860s, but I'm not entirely sure. If we were going to convert it to today's money, it would be almost $250,000. So I'm not exactly sure about that. But there was a man named John Wesley Hyatt who had no background in chemistry, and he said, I'm going to do it. And then he did it, kind of. He did create celluloid, which is one of the bases of the plastics we have today. However, he did not actually collect the prize money from the competition. Apparently, his billiard balls didn't exactly mimic the properties that the competition goers wanted. There was an issue with the way that they would bounce. So that's a little bit of a problem for him.
[00:13:09.710] - Clark Marchese
But what's not a problem is now you can go and listen to Erica Jane's new single, wherever fine music can be found. It's so interesting that the first plastics were sort of an environmental initiative, and now it seems to be one of the largest environmental catastrophes that we have brought upon ourselves.
[00:13:28.950] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
Keep in mind that initially, when they were making these environmental issues were not really the primary push. It was more coming up with an alternate to a natural substance that could be produced more easily cheaper. Trying to reduce the slaughter of animals definitely did play a role, but that was not really the primary focus of why they were developing these materials.
[00:13:52.760] - Clark Marchese
Womp. Womp. Okay. I was really rooting for them to be environmental stewards. But maybe we'll call it a happy accident or a temporary happy accident for the elephants of old. I did a bit of digging, and I also found out that it was a happy accident for turtles and bulls at the time, whose shells and horns were being used in products that these new plastics could replace. I think it's probably true that their motivation was more so to avoid depleting a natural resource completely, rather than some crusade for animal rights. But even now, you find that the search for alternative sources of plastics is largely driven by the fact that fossil fuels, which is what they're primarily made of, is running out. It's also interesting that this is not the first time that something like this has happened. I guess when we first started using fossil fuels, it was really good for whales because the rate at which we were using their blubber for fuel was outpacing their ability to reproduce. And now also, the benefit that came for animals from these ships has been short lived, because we know that plastics and fossil fuels alike have turned out to be quite a problem for whales and turtles.
[00:14:57.410] - Clark Marchese
But speaking of the environment, there are several consequences that plastic has. And I'm wondering if the earlier forms of plastic had similar consequences.
[00:15:07.490] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
Not necessarily. The other thing you have to keep in mind is the scale of production of these plastics at this time point was minuscule in comparison to what we do today. The world's population was a lot smaller. The amount of materials that people were using was much, much less. And so there definitely was implications. This was an industrial process, but it wasn't at the same level or scale as what we think about today.
[00:15:31.470] - Clark Marchese
So then, to trace how we got from there to today, what are the major milestones or catalysts in the history?
[00:15:38.510] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
Of the production of plastic? There's many. Okay, so from these initial ones, probably the next big milestone was bakelite. Bakelite is a little bit different than these early plastics. These early plastics are referred to as semi synthetic plastics because we're taking a material that we can find in nature, we're modifying that and then turning that into a plastic. Bakelite was the very first fully synthetic plastic. And so we're taking essentially small chemical species reacting those together to make a plastic. And so we're essentially starting from ground zero and building up the plastic. And that's the way most plastics are now. And so, in terms of our dependence on petroleum, it is byproducts from the refining of petroleum that then act as feedstock chemicals that we can then turn into plastics. That was then, in the early 19 hundreds, when bakewhite kind of started.
[00:16:29.100] - Clark Marchese
Okay, let's do a little pause for a vocabulary lesson, because that's going to be a big one. When we're talking about plastics, particularly the future of plastics. Feedstock is the word of the day, and that refers to what material the plastic is made out of. So bake light in 1907 marks the shift from before, when the feedstock of plastic was primarily naturally occurring substances to not naturally occurring at all. The reason feedstock is so important is because it acts sort of as the origin for all the consequences that come out of plastic from production, consumption, and all the way to waste. Some feedstocks, like petroleum, are a lot more impactful than others in those three areas. I can't say that other feedstocks are categorically less impactful. But feedstock is largely the root of.
[00:17:14.130] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
Many problems after that. There's a number of other milestones as well. Things like the introduction of condensation polymers. So this is things like nylon or polyester, which are incredibly important in terms of fibers and fabrics. After that was the introduction of ziggler natocatalysts in the 1950s. And so this allowed, industrially, for them to produce much better polymers like polyethylene or polypropylene, which is the basics basis of things like plastic bottles and plastic containers that we use today. The other big one for me in my particular area was the realization in the 1960s and 1970s that some certain types of polymers and plastics could conduct electricity and exhibit properties that normally we only find in inorganic and metallic type species. And that then opened the way for what we call organic electronics. And so these are electronics that are not based upon metals, but are based upon things like plastic.
[00:18:15.800] - Clark Marchese
Okay, so first we have nylon and polyester, which are basically fabrics. And then we have polyethylene and polypropylene, which are containers. And probably there's a lot of other things you can do with them, but more solid versions. And then, most recently, we have applications of using plastic and electricity in one. It seems like these inventions and applications surrounding plastic are just growing and growing. I'm wondering what was driving these developments.
[00:18:41.450] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
So, when we think of plastics, there are so many different applications and uses for plastics, that it's hard to kind of lump everything into one kind of overarching kind of viewpoint. But largely, a lot of this was driven by industry. And generally in industry, what we want to be able to do is make something which has better properties of some sort at a lower cost point so that the company itself can make more profit off of what they're producing and selling.
[00:19:14.930] - Clark Marchese
Okay, so basically, the industry was just following the money wherever the money was to be made. In that sense, it's a very american story. I think nowadays, in 2024, we can probably have a different discussion about corporate social responsibility. But back when these products were first being developed in the middle of the 19 hundreds, I don't know that companies really had an understanding of all the consequences that would come from plastics. It's not like the fossil fuel industry, where they knew that they were going to contribute to climate change, and they hid that information from us for years, decades, actually. But it wasn't until the 1990s, around when we first started paying attention to plastic waste and the consequences that came with that. And it wasn't even until more recently, when we started to actually pay attention to the problems of plastic production and consumption. A lot of scientists will tell you that we still don't even really know all of the ways that plastic consumption is going to be affecting us. Now. This is not to say that all industrial action that happened before the 1990s is off the hook. Some industries are better than others.
[00:20:14.740] - Clark Marchese
We don't have time to go into it on this episode. And beyond that, it deserves its own episode. But one thing that we need to mention when we tell the story of plastic is how the wars of the 20th century and plastic research, development and industrialization are closely linked. Dr. Rasmussen mentioned nylon, which led to an industry boom in fashion in the middle of the century. But its development was merely a byproduct of nylon rope intended for military use. Furthermore, a lot of the weapons we have today are because of breakthroughs in plastics research. And a lot of the plastics we have today is linked to the development of weapons. So it is a part of the plastic story that has to be told, just not today. But if we are going to think about industry and why it's been so successful, and this also relates to its accessibility, is because companies have been using plastic for decades as the cheap option. But I think about the earliest uses, which were billiard balls and all. And first of all, that $10,000 reward was not cheap. But then I think of the type of person who was playing billiard balls in a social club in the 18 hundreds.
[00:21:14.980] - Clark Marchese
It doesn't necessarily represent the majority, shall we say? So were plastics always as accessible or ubiquitous in the early stages as they are now?
[00:21:25.070] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
So, with the introduction of celluloid here in the US, at least within the US, these were readily accessible for a lot of people to the point where they at least had one or two plastic items, usually in their home. These might be small things like a plastic toothbrush, something like that. Again, keep in mind that these early types of plastics had properties a little bit different than what we think of as a lot of types of modern plastics that are very soft and flexible. So these were much harder plastics, and so the types of applications were a little bit limited. And so these were things like these were used in dice, these were used in combs. Another big popular application early was a plastic collar for clothes that then required less starching. And so again, these were readily accessible to the average person. But you didn't have a house full of plastic items, you had a few plastic items. And then as the plastics industry continued to develop, we started replacing more and more other types of materials, metals, ceramics, things like that, with plastics. And a lot of that was a drive to, again, make things cheaper, make things lighter, make things smaller.
[00:22:38.110] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
And that's the same thing that we see today, right? Everyone wants a smaller, more powerful cell phone, and that's not possible unless we continue to advance the types of materials that we're making those out of.
[00:22:49.580] - Clark Marchese
Okay, so not only did they continue to get cheaper over time, their intended use changed, or perhaps even the length of their intended use got shorter. We could say one of the reasons why plastic waste is such an issue today is because a lot of it is designed for single use. Essentially, someone can use a piece of plastic for less than 10 seconds and then throw it away. So at what point did we start to see this concept of single use plastics developing? It sounds like it probably wasn't from the beginning
[00:23:17.080] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
Definitely not. So that's really a much more recent thing. The plastics that were being developed at the beginning. So things made from cellulite were not something to ever consider throwing away in any short term. These were meant to replace materials that you would normally keep in your household for decades, right? So things made from ivory were somewhat precious, these were a lot cheaper, but they were kind of replacing those same materials, and so people were not thinking about throwing these things away. Likewise, the mindset in that time period was definitely not single use or disposable type materials. Most people hung onto things until they no longer worked. And so these plastics worked for quite a long time. And so people kept these and didn't just chuck them out after a couple of uses. It has really only been, as we've continued, to make plastics cheaper and cheaper to the point where it is cost effective to think about single use, and people want something that they don't have to worry about hanging on to. And so it's both a change in the technology in plastics and a change in the cultural mindset that kind of led us to where we are now with the overabundance of single use plastics.
[00:24:32.670] - Clark Marchese
Yeah, it's interesting. I've almost pretty much lived my whole life where plastic is basically synonymous with disposable. But you're telling us that it wasn't so long ago that plastic was intended to be a substitute for something that was made to last. Something. Something durable, something with longevity. Our relationship with the material has completely changed in just a few generations. But the problem is, plastic does still have that longevity that it was meant to from the beginning, whether we keep it in our homes or we throw it in the garbage. I guess that's why we face as many problems as we do. We are going to start to wrap up the episode, and there's a couple of questions I like to ask at the end. The first is, is there anything that we missed? What else do we need to mention when it comes to the history of plastic?
[00:25:12.880] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
I want to reiterate that oftentimes we want to blame plastics, right? And really, the plastics themselves are not to blame. We have made a particular material to do something, and in the process, our culture and the way we use those plastics has changed as well. And it's less about the plastic itself and the way that we both use the material, such as single use plastics, and more critically, the way that we dispose of these plastics.
[00:25:47.490] - Clark Marchese
I can agree with that. Next, I wonder if there's one piece of good news that has come out recently in your field that you'd like to share with us.
[00:25:55.910] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
So for me, as I said, I work with plastics that conduct electricity. And so these are used for a lot of different applications. One of the big ones that has been looked at for quite a long time is making solar cells from plastic. And so traditional solar cells are made from silicon. They're heavy, they're not flexible. By making these from plastic, then we can make them very, very lightweight. We can make them flexible to the point where they can be folded up or rolled up in terms of their applications. The downside is for the longest time, these types of organic solar cells have not been very efficient. We can't get a lot of energy out of them. And within the last couple of years, we've gotten to the point now where these are becoming competitive with silicon solar cells. And so now we have something which can be pretty similar in terms of their operation with traditional solar cells, but have a lot of other benefits on how you might want to use these.
[00:26:50.870] - Clark Marchese
Well, I think that speaks to what you were just saying about what we use plastic for. Plastic does what we create it to do. So getting more intentional about it might be able to help us in a number of ways. Later on the show, we're going to talk about a lot of ways in which plastic contributes to climate change. But one of the reasons for that is that we use so much fossil fuel as energy to produce it. But maybe if we can use plastic to generate greener energy, that can be one of many steps we need to take to reduce its impact. I guess we'll see. And on that note, I want to say, Dr. Rasmussen, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I learned a lot, and thank you for your time.
[00:27:27.760] - Dr. Seth Rasmussen
I'm glad I could participate.
[00:27:38.530] - Clark Marchese
I want to give another big thank you to Dr. Seth Rasmussen for giving us that introduction to the history of plastic. It will serve as a launching pad for a lot of the future discussions we're going to have. And I've got an episode coming out every week for a while. So the good news is you can subscribe wherever you're listening to, see it in your podcast feed whenever they drop. Next time, we're shaking things up a bit to talk to a scientist named Abby Burroughs who put together the largest database in the world for microplastics in the oceans. You've been listening to plastic podcast. You can find more information about this week's guest and their work in the episode description. The plastic podcast is part of a larger sciency podcast network called Pine Forest Media, both of which you can also find more information about in the episode description or on the website pineforestpods.com and Instagram at Pineforest Media. Cover art for the show was done by Laurel Wong. Laurel also did the Pine Forest media logo, and the music you're listening to was done by todayo cabejos. I am your host, Clark Marchese. This episode was produced, written, and engineered by me.
[00:28:45.860] - Clark Marchese
So if you loved it, I will not only see you here next week, but I would really appreciate a five star rating and review. Pine Forest Media has some exciting sciency shows coming out this year, and a review is one of the best things you can do to help the entire network grow. That's all for now. See you soon. Bye.
